by Elle Gray
“So,” I say into the silence. “You’re an operative for the Thirteen.”
Kit looks down into her wine glass as if she could find the answers at the bottom of it. She’s tense. I can tell by the way her shoulders are bunched up. But more than that, I can see that she’s scared. And as angry as I am that she’s been living this double life and keeping herself hidden from me all these years, it breaks my heart to see her so scared. I never wanted to see her feeling that way.
“I was,” she corrects me softly. “Was an operative. A spy. An assassin when necessary. But things—changed. I changed and I broke ranks.”
“You got out?”
She shrugs. “There is no out. Not really,” she says.
The puzzle pieces finally start to fall into place in my head. No wonder Kit showed up when she did. No wonder the Thirteen have ramped up their efforts against me.
“I guess now that you openly moved against Mangold, that puts a target on your back, too,” I muse. “If the Đavole is after me, I can only—
“No, Blake. That’s not why the Đavole is in Seattle. He was never here to kill you. He’s here to kill me.”
“Kit. Are you kidding me?”
She shook her head. “I wish I were. But after I did what I did and ran, the Thirteen’s leadership tasked the Đavole with hunting me down and killing me.”
“What did you do, Kit? Surely there’s a way for us to undo it.”
“There’s not. The Thirteen does not forget. And they most certainly do not forgive,” she says. “I’m a marked woman. It’s only a matter of time before they catch up with me. It’s why I’ve been going out every night—I’ve been hunting the Đavole myself. I thought if maybe I was able to put him down, it might make anybody else coming after me think twice.”
“What did you do?”
She takes a sip of wine and settles back in her seat. Her expression is grim and fear is in her eyes. But she takes a deep breath and stares into the flames.
“What I told you about growing up in France was true. But so was what I told you about not forgetting who I am. When I turned fifteen, the Thirteen sent me to a special school in Serbia. There, I was trained to be a spy and an assassin,” she explains. “I was schooled in spycraft—just like they teach at the CIA. I was trained in poisons, sabotage, various forms of martial arts. I learned how to kill with a blade, with whatever I could find, and with my bare hands. By the time I graduated at eighteen, I was lethal. I was the most promising student in my class.”
“Jesus, Kit,” I gasp.
“I was assigned to a handler here in the US. I was given assignments to carry out and I did them. I played the part, always remembering who I am and never giving in to the darkness inside of me. Not fully,” she says. “I developed a good reputation and quickly ascended the ranks. The Thirteen’s Council came to trust me, and I began getting assignments directly from them. But what they didn’t know was that I was working against them from the inside.”
I take a sip of my wine, completely caught up in my sister’s tale, which sounds like something straight out of a Tom Clancy novel.
“I collected information on everybody I interacted with. I got names of the Thirteen’s key players. I stole copies of dossiers of various missions I was sent on,” she goes on. “I stole video evidence. Data sticks. Anything that can help bring this whole organization down. I have a treasure trove of information that, if released, will destroy some of the nation’s biggest institutions, and a good portion of Congress along with it.”
“Do they know you have this information?”
She nods. “They do now,” she says. “I tried to make a deal—the information in exchange for a guarantee of your safety.”
“What did they say?”
“They sent somebody to kill me the other night,” she says. “So, I’ll take that as a no.”
“Did you—did you kill who they sent?”
Kit looks down into her glass again and says nothing. Which I will take to be a yes. My head is spinning and waves of disbelief are crashing down over me. What my sister just told me sounds like the stuff of science fiction. And I wouldn’t have believed a word of it had I not seen the way she handled Mangold’s man back in the storage facility. But it’s obvious she’s been trained and trained well. She knows what she’s doing in a fight and can handle herself. But still, the idea that my kid sister has grown up to be a spy and an assassin—I can’t quite wrap my head around that.
“Anyway, I was trying to decide when the right time to leave was. And when I was handed an assignment to kill you, it seemed like a sign that the time was right,” she tells me. “They said the operative assigned to you had failed and that I needed to clean up the mess. So, I took everything I’d collected over the years and disappeared. They’ve been hunting me ever since.”
“How long have you been living here? In this safehouse?” I ask.
“About a year,” she says. “I’ve watched you before, you know. Gave serious thought to approaching you.”
“Why didn’t you, Kit?”
“I was scared. And I was ashamed.”
“Ashamed?”
“Ashamed of what I’ve become,” she whispers, her voice thick with emotion. “Afraid of what you would think of me. I’m a monster, Blake. It’s what I am. It’s what I’ve become. I’ve done unspeakable things and I didn’t want to see that you thought that too. So I stayed away.”
“You had no choice, Kit. You’re not a monster,” I tell her encouragingly. “If you didn’t do what they wanted, they would have killed you. You survived. And that’s nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing.”
“I only survived because other people died. That is something to be ashamed of.”
“It’s not. You had no choice,” I press. “They had a gun to your head the whole time. If you didn’t do what they wanted, they would have killed you. It’s that simple.”
A wry laugh escapes her. “It’s funny hearing Miss Law and Order FBI Supergirl excusing away cold-blooded murder.”
“I’m not excusing it away. I’m pointing out that there are mitigating factors,” I explain. “We do it all the time for a host of different reasons when prosecuting them. And I can promise you that I have never heard of a story like yours from any of the different killers I’ve dealt with over the course of my career.”
I admit that it’s possibly hypocrisy at its finest. I’ve always believed that murderers deserve to be locked up and have the key thrown away. But this is different. Kit didn’t kill somebody while robbing a bank. She didn’t shoot someone out of petty revenge or out of cruelty. No, she was stolen from her home and groomed to be what she became. The blood on her hands isn’t her own. It belongs to the people who trained her to be what she is.
Maybe it’s rationalizing an inconvenient fact about a loved one. Maybe I’m justifying the things she’s done or trying to alleviate her of the responsibility of taking a human life. Maybe I am a hypocrite. If that’s the case, I can live with that. Kit was ripped away from everything she knew and loved when she was nine years old. She was thrown into a world that was literally kill or be killed, and not only did she survive, she worked to destroy the entire thing from the inside. That takes a kind of strength and bravery that I might not even possess.
“Anyway,” she goes on. “I knew when I disappeared, they’d task somebody else to take you out. That’s why I turned up at Annie’s when I did. I wanted to be close to protect you.”
The final pieces of the puzzle finally fall into place, and I’m left in a state of utter disbelief. There are so many things I want to ask. So many things I want to understand. But to be honest, I don’t even know where to begin. We sit in silence for a long while, sipping our wine and staring into the flames in the hearth.
Finally, Kit gets to her feet. “We should probably get some rest and pick this up in the morning. We’ve had a long day and I think we’ll both be better off if we sleep on everything I just told you.”
I nod. “T
hat’s fair,” I say as I stand and take her hand. “Thank you for telling me, Kit. Thank you for sharing that.”
“Had to come out sooner or later.”
I shrug. “Yeah, maybe. But I’m grateful you chose sooner. I feel like I understand you a lot better now.”
“I’m not sure that’s a good thing,” she replies glumly.
“I am. It’s a very good thing,” I tell her simply. “I do just have two questions I need the answer to before we turn in.
“All right.”
“First—did you have anything to do with the deaths of the Supreme Court Justices?”
She shuffles her feet and looks down at the ground but says nothing. That silence tells me all I need to know, and it’s probably better that I don’t know anything more. I clear my throat.
“What’s your second question?”
“Did you have anything to do with Mark Walton’s death?”
“No,” she says simply. “I didn’t kill him.”
“Do you know who did?”
She nods. “The Đavole.”
“Him again.”
“Him again. And we’ll keep hearing about him until we put him down,” she nods. “Now, I’m going to go to bed. You should too. Goodnight, Blake.”
I give her a sad smile. “Goodnight, Kit.”
I head for my bedroom but don’t know that I’m going to be able to find sleep tonight.
Twenty-Eight
Kit’s Safehouse; Overlake District, 41872 E. Whitecap Street, Redmond, WA
“Here, use this,” Kit says. “It’s an encrypted phone.”
She hands the phone to Astra so she can call Benjamin and let him know that she’s all right—more or less. I texted him and Rosie last night to let them know she is safe, but I know he will be overjoyed to actually hear her voice. I’m standing in the kitchen cooking breakfast for everybody. I’m feeling surprisingly refreshed after a night spent mostly tossing and turning. It’s not that I was having nightmares or was feeling completely anxious—I shockingly wasn’t, despite the hell of a night we had—but something was keeping me awake anyway.
But I must have drifted off at some point, because I woke up this morning feeling strangely—good. Can’t explain it and don’t care to. I’m just going to enjoy it because I know it’s not going to last. These things never do. Eventually that other shoe is going to drop, and when it does, I’m sure it’s going to be nasty. It usually is. Kit wanders into the kitchen to give Astra a little privacy as she talks to her man. She looks down into the bowl I’m using and grins.
“Blueberry waffles?” she asks.
“Well, you didn’t have bananas, or I would have made you your Elvis waffles.”
She laughs. “Blueberry has always been my second favorite.”
I give her a grin. “I remember.”
“You know, for a little while there, I was convinced you were the Đavole,” I tell her.
A genuine laugh bursts from Kit’s mouth and she looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. She’s smiling wide and shaking her head.
“Me? The Đavole?” she asks. “Flattering, but no. He is a legend.”
“I kind of wonder if a legend is all he is,” I comment. “Or at least, more legend than substance.”
She shakes her head. “He is the most lethal man on this planet. He only kills with a blade because he thinks guns aren’t sporting,” Kit says. “He enjoys what he does. Really enjoys it.”
“Makes sense that he uses a blade then. It’s the most personal way to kill,” I note. “If he enjoys it, it would have to be personal for him. He’s also a raging psychopath at the very least. I can’t even imagine the host of mental issues he has. He’d be a psychologist’s dream.”
“I wonder what they’d say about me,” Kit says.
“You have issues, I’m sure. But then, you were abducted. Your parents were murdered,” I point out. “There isn’t a person on the planet who wouldn’t come through what you did and not have issues. But the important thing is, you stayed true to who you are. You found and nurtured that piece inside yourself that was just for you. That takes an enormous amount of courage and strength, Kit.”
Kit starts taking things out of the cupboards for breakfast—plates, syrup, peanut butter. She isn’t saying anything, but I can see her chewing on my words. I can see she wants to believe me and alleviate the weight of the guilt pressing down on her, but she can’t get there quite yet. She’s still trapped in that dark spiral and it’s going to take her a little more time and help to get her out of it.
“Did you know him? The Đavole?”
She shakes her head. “He was in a class a few years ahead of me. I’ve only seen him at a distance once. That was enough for me,” she says. “Even at a distance, I could see there was something different about him. He just radiates evil. Malevolence. Even though we’ve never spoken a word to each other, I’m afraid of him.”
“He sounds like a real charmer.”
“I guess you don’t have to be to do what he does.”
“And you were out hunting this guy? On your own?”
“Trust me when I say that nobody but me can handle him,” she replies. “And I’m not entirely sure I can. I just know I wasn’t going to let him get to you.”
I give her a smile and squeeze her hand then start making the waffles. “You want to get the table set?”
“Sure thing.”
After I finish making the waffles, I take the tray out to the table. Astra and Kit are already sitting there chatting like old friends. It’s good to see. It’s also really good to see that Astra is up and around again. I can tell she’s still in pain, but she’s doing her best to mask it.
“All right, let’s dig in,” I announce.
We serve up breakfast and tuck into our meals. The conversation is surprisingly loose and easy. There’s a lot of laughter and to me, it feels like a massive weight has been lifted off my shoulders. It feels like that dark thundercloud that’s been following me around and hanging over my head forever has moved on.
I’m sure it’ll come back at some point, but I will gladly enjoy this temporary reprieve for as long as it lasts. It just seems right and good to be hanging out with my sister and my best friend. It’s something I never would have anticipated happening six months ago—but the fact that it is happening just proves how funny life can be and how quickly things can change.
“The only thing that could make this breakfast better would be a pitcher of mimosas,” Astra grins.
Kit and I laugh and nod in agreement. But with things starting to move, we need to be sharp and on our game. We’ll have plenty of time for mimosas when this is all over.
“How is Benjamin doing?” I ask.
“He’s rattled,” she replies. “But he’s all right. He just wants to see me. Wants proof that I’m actually alive and well.”
“Well, you’re alive anyway,” I note with a laugh.
“I’m fine. Bumps and bruises,” she argues.
“And a possible fractured arm,” Kit notes. “Dr. Santos filled us in last night and suggested you get it looked at ASAP.”
“You said hospitals were a no-go,” she frowns.
“They are,” I reply. “In Washington. That’s why I’m going to talk to Rosie and get you and Benjamin on a plane for California as soon as possible.”
“What? No,” Astra gasps. “I’m not bailing on you. Not when we’re this close to the end of the Thirteen.”
“I can’t let you stay here,” I insist. “Not while the Đavole is hunting us. You’re in no condition to fight right now.”
“But—”
Kit shakes her head. “She’s right, Astra. You’re not in any shape to fight this man,” she says. “Believe me. You need to be one hundred percent to have any hope of beating him. And even that might not be enough.”
“I want to make sure you and Benjamin are safe,” I add. “That’s the most important thing to me right now. And the safest place for you two is in California—fa
r away from the Thirteen’s pet assassin.”
Astra sighs and I can see the conflict on her face. This isn’t sitting well with her, but with the bomb about to drop and the Thirteen not having any compunction about going after loved ones, the best thing to do is get Astra and Benjamin out of the blast radius.
“All right,” Astra finally relents. “Maybe a few days in the sunshine on a beautiful Southern California beach is just what the doctor ordered.”
“That’s the spirit,” I cheer.
“I’m sorry it’s come to this, Astra,” Kit says.
Astra gives her that look she gives me when she’s about to verbally spank me. It’s kind of nice seeing it directed at somebody else for a change.
“There’s nothing for you to be sorry for, Kit. And trust me when I say it would have come to this whether you were here or not,” she says. “Your sister is something of a magnet for trouble and the wheels were already in motion before you turned up. So, stop kicking your own butt, chin up, and go put a hurting on these pieces of garbage. Make it Biblical.”
Kit smiled and laughed softly as she nodded. “Thank you, Astra. I—I needed that.”
“Absolutely. I wish I were going into this fight with you. I really do.”
“I wish you were too,” I tell her. “But it’ll do me a world of good to know you’re safe and out of the danger zone.”
She frowns but I can tell she sees the wisdom in it, and she gives me a nod. I can see how badly she wants to be here in the thick of things. Astra is a fighter. Always has been. It must be killing her that now that the situation with the Thirteen is finally coming to a head, she’s going to have to sit on the sidelines.
“I don’t like it, and I want to be there, but you’re right.”
“Good. I’ll call Rosie and tell her we’re coming in. She can arrange to have a couple of US Marshals escort you to the airport and get you out of here safely,” I tell her.